("I almost went to bed ...") from "The Spice-Box of Earth"

Source: flickr.com via Anna on Pinterest

I almost went to bed

without remembering

the four white violets

I put in the button-hole

of your green sweater

and how i kissed you then

and you kissed me

shy as though I'd

never been your lover

April

To the fresh wet fields

and the white

froth of flowers



Came the wild errant

swallows with a scream

A color of the sky

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store

and the police station,

a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;



overflowing with blossomfoam,

like a sudsy mug of beer;

like a bride ripping off her clothes,



dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,



so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.

It's been doing that all week:

making beauty,

and throwing it away,

and making more.

Letters from Exile- IV

I woke up at 2 a.m. with a start.

It was raining outside—birds

were angry, the streets full

of fire-engines —and I thought of you

after years: where are you now,

and how are you living, so far away,

with your black and white t.v.

by the window that opens

up to tea stalls, your single-bed

in a square apartment, walls

calendared with gods and goddesses

all the way back to nineteen

ninety-six. Tell me, my beautiful

loss, my hyacinth, how are you living

in the valleys of Dehra,

in that house you have made

with a young man you love.
----------------
There is something so beautiful yet spare about these lines- 'my beautiful loss, my hyacinth'- it's ageless, a piece of the writer's soul, yet evokes such ordinary, everyday images. I used to read this poet's blog a long time ago and he is pricelessly talented.

VI (from Midsummer)

Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn,

Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down

in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.

The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails

round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.

Casa Rosada, the Argentinian mood,

croons from the balcony. Monotonous lurid bushes

brush the damp clouds with the ideograms of buzzards

over the Chinese groceries. The oven alleys stifle.

In Belmont, mournful tailors peer over old machines,

stitching June and July together seamlessly.

And one waits for midsummer lightning as the armed sentry

in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.

But I feed on its dust, its ordinariness,

on the faith that fills its exiles with horror,

on the hills at dusk with their dusty orange lights,

even on the pilot light in the reeking harbour

that turns like a police car's. The terror

is local, at least. Like the magnolia's whorish whiff.

All night, the barks of a revolution crying wolf.

The moon shines like a lost button.

The yellow sodium lights on the wharf come on.

In streets, dishes clatter behind dim windows.

The night is companionable, the future as fierce as

tomorrow's sun everywhere. I can understand

Borges's blind love for Buenos Aires,

how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hand.

Point

No hay espacio más ancho que el dolor

No hay universo como aquel que sangra
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

transated:
There is no space wider than that of grief

There is no universe like that which bleeds

Separation

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.